Greenberg Research Fellow Alexandra Szabó presents on post-Holocaust memories of sterilization and castration abuse

On April 2, 2024, 2023-2024 Margee and Douglas Greenberg Research Fellow Alexandra Szabó, PhD candidate in History at Brandeis University, delivered a lecture entitled “Sterilization and Castration Abuse: Coping with Holocaust Memories.” In her dissertation research, Szabó investigates how criminal medical experiments Nazis performed on Hungarian Jews and Roma that targeted reproductive organs. During her monthlong residency at the USC Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research, Szabó focused on the postwar memories of sterilization and castration abuse, conducting research in the USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive (VHA).

Szabó opened her lecture explaining the term she coined — “prolonged genocide” — which captures the ways that mass violence and its impacts continue even after what many conceive of as the “end” of an episode of genocide or mass violence. Particularly with medical abuses, she argued, the violence perpetrated during the Holocaust remains throughout entire lifetimes. Szabó explores the ways in which this concept is evident in the oral history testimonies in the VHA by analyzing the ways in which survivors remember, narrate, and relate their experiences, which often extend beyond what interviewees are saying.

Noting several patterns in how survivors articulate and express their memories surrounding the medical abuses, Szabó first focused on the frequency with which interviewees speak about castration and sterilization abuse in the third person. She argued this allows survivors to create distance from the event and speak as a witness rather than a victim. Indeed, Szabó explained, the German SS murdered many of the victims of these sterilization and castration experiments. In the testimonies that contain discussion of these abuses, survivors speak frequently about the women who received intrauterine injections in Block 10 of Auschwitz or the men who forcibly underwent surgical removal of their testes. Acting as a witness rather than a victim, Szabó argued, is also common in instances of sexual abuse. Through the USC Shoah Foundation’s pre-interview questionnaires and the interview’s inclusion of survivors’ postwar lives, Szabó is able to analyze whether these survivors who position themselves as witnesses had children after the Holocaust, which adds some context to their witnessing of these crimes. The Nazi sterilizations and their lasting effects, such as causing the inability to reproduce, demonstrate Szabó’s notion of a prolonged genocide.

Then Szabó turned to the category of interviewees who identify themselves as the victims of these abuses and the patterns she noticed in their testimonies. In these cases, she described, the survivors themselves talk about the experiments and the ongoing physiological and psychological experiences of these abuses. Throughout her presentation, Szabó presented clips from VHA testimonies, including a survivor named Marta Antal, who discusses her visit to Auschwitz in 1957. She talks about her inability to become a mother and remembers being surrounded on that visit by women who did have children after the war. In her reflection, Marta makes the distinction between the collective and individual victimhood of genocide, as exemplified by the prolonged nature of the violence, such as reproductive violence. In her analysis of victim accounts, Szabó discussed both verbal and non-verbal expressions in the testimonies.

Szabó then discussed the category that she called “negative or silent testimonies.” Meaning can be drawn from omissions and silences, Szabó asserted. In this pattern she identified, survivors do not discuss the medical abuses that they underwent in concentration camps. However, using other sources, such as post-war claims for reparations, Szabó is able to triangulate their experiences. There are many gendered and institutional reasons that women in particular do not share these accounts. When survivors remain silent, Szabó argued, the pain of remembering gestures to other instances in the historical record.

In the final category, Szabó discussed non-existent or silenced testimonies — the stories that were never recorded in the VHA — turning to other historical records and sources to see what they reveal. She discussed examples from the Nuremberg Military Tribunal and compensation claims of Hungarian Romani survivors. In these sources from trials and claims, many people point to the criminal medical experiments they underwent in concentration camps. Szabó highlighted the lack of Romani accounts compared to other groups and highlighted some written accounts from Lovara survivors who had been located in pre-war Austria and Hungary. Testimony can also be found in art, Szabó pointed out. She played a clip of Lovara survivor Ceija Stojka, who is an artist and whose testimony can be found in the VHA. In her VHA interview, Stojka discusses witnessing sterilization in Ravensbrück Concentration Camp. Szabó described the ways in which Stojka has produced “unconventional testimony,” which includes art. Happily, the Wende Museum in Los Angeles had an exhibition of Stojka’s art during Szabó’s residency.

Szabó’s lecture was followed by a lengthy and lively question and answer period. She first touched on the differences between sterilization and castration. There is a popular misconception, she explained, that these differences are based on sex. However, in fact, she clarified that these are two types of medical procedures that target the reproductive organs and glands differently. Szabó discussed terminology, reflecting on her use of the word “victim” instead of “survivor,” and speaking about whether her concept of prolonged genocide could be applied to other areas or instances of mass violence.